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Mad Girl's Love Song // Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all the world is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: Exist seraphim and Satan's men: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

#sylvia plath #mad girl's love song #poetry #literature #love song

Introduction to Poetry // Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

#poetry #literature #billy collins #introduction to poetry #poet laureate

Li-Young Lee // Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair.

My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt.

But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening.

#li-young lee #liyoung lee #li young lee #poetry #morning

Peter Everwine // Back from the Fields

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields, looking for God knows what. Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing. Something to fill an empty spot. Maybe a luminous angel or a country girl with a secret dark. He came back empty-handed, or so I thought.

Now I find them: thistles, goatheads, the barbed weeds all those with hooks or horns the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones those wearing lantern jaws, old ones in beards, leapers in silk leggings, the multiple pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those with juices and saps like the fingers of thieves nation after nation of grasses that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds and grab handholds in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.

#peter everwine #back from the fields #fields #poetry #literature

Clouds // Cyril Wong

Those clouds are not Baudelaire’s clouds. They believe in long-distance relationships. Clouds give back the images by which we know ourselves. All clouds preserve a hierarchy; the colder it gets the higher you climb. Some huddle around the moon for comfort. Taking sides, forming factions, only to split away again. Sniggering when we look up, making faces. And liken the city’s lights to stars, yet having no desire to count them. They love to take pictures during a storm, but never of the same place twice. Pulling away from the sky, the sky bears down. Clouds negotiate with eternity; eternity would have nothing to do with us. The clouds are just clouds—make no mistake about it.

#clouds #cyril wong #poetry #singaporean lit #literature

Homicide // Michelle Tan

Let there be a soul.

Ask; ask and you will be (for)given. You will learn too late that heaven is wide enough even for your vast smallness of spirit. No one stands on death's edge with clenched hands, gripping a lifetime's unpardoned past;

the trick, apparently, is in the release. But what of it, being brought to my knees now scraped and sorry and in the dirt? I am Wystan's swept up wood (Nothing now can ever), no closer to becoming, in matters of (im)mortality, an expert.

I did not know this love was but for rent. And I, pauper of heart, unqualified to extend its lease, will pay in pain's aching currency the gaping debt I owe. Having to believe in time is a necessity; having to grieve not always so. Be it for an estimated eternity

or some length of passage just under that, the wait is the death sentence. And yet the judge is harshest who sits in the mirror; who has my missing limbs and my chains and in identical places, my dried-out bloodstains. And I am the axe-wielding manslaughterer

hoping for parole.

#homicide #michelle tan #singapore #poetry #literature

Insomniac // Maya Angelou

There are some nights when sleep plays coy, aloof and disdainful. And all the wiles that I employ to win its service to my side are useless as wounded pride, and much more painful.

#insomniac #maya angelou #poetry #poem #literature

larmoyante

But she might hold him. That was all that mattered now. To hold him. To hold him. Not to let him go. Make him stay.

Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (via larmoyante)

no help for that // Charles Bukowski

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space

and even during the best moments and the greatest times

we will know it we will know it more than ever

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled

and we will wait and wait

in that space.

#no help for that #no help #charles bukowski #bukowski #poetry

Masks // Shel Silverstein

She had blue skin, And so did he. He kept it hid And so did she. They searched for blue Their whole life through, Then passed right by- And never knew.

#masks #shel silverstein #poetry #poem #every thing on it

Boats // Cyril Wong

You and your photographs of boats; that repeated metaphor for departure, or simply the possibility of a voyage? What you cannot tell me, you tell me with a vessel and its single passenger, eyes fixed on some skylit conclusion. Set apart and starkly upon a canvas of tractable waves, brought to still by the trigger-click of your camera, like the sound a key makes when it releases the lock. Your heart became that lock; these images are how you have always articulated distance, a withdrawal. Darling, there are just as many ways of saying goodbye as there are ways of letting you go. The boat is narrow like the width of my heart after impossible loss, cruel resignation; this heart you ride in. Love, if this is how you choose to leave me, let me let you.

#boats #cyril wong #poetry #poem #singapore

Evening Without Angels // Wallace Stevens

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged Above the trees? And why the poet as Eternal chef d’orchestre?

Air is air. Its vacancy glitters around us everywhere. Its sounds are not angelic syllables But our unfashioned spirits realized More sharply in more furious selves.

And light That fosters seraphim and is to them Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweler– Was the sun concoct for angels or for men? Sad men made angels of the sun, and of The moon they made their own attendant ghosts, Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun And men of day and never of pointed night, Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air In an accord of repetitions. Yet, If we repeat, it is because the wind Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible The motions of the mind and giving form To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day Accomplished in the immensely flashing East, Desire for rest, in that descending sea Of dark, which in its very darkening Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

…Evening, when the measure skips a beat And then another, one by one, and all To a seething minor swiftly modulate. Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare, Except for our own houses, huddled low Beneath the arches and their spangled air, Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire, Where the voice that is in us makes a true response, Where the voice that is great within us rises up, As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

#evening without angels #wallace stevens #poetry #poem #lit

Inventing the Body // Dora Malech

The lungs were my idea. Shins, his. Breasts, mine, though he agreed. He tried to name his favorite organ Mr. Winky, but titles were forbidden from the start. Laughter was a vital sign, amended to a ticking in the chest. We called the heart the heart because we could not say its real name, even to each other, even in the dark.

#inventing the body #dora malech #body #poetry #poem

Night Workers // Helen Dunmore

All you who are awake in the dark of the night, all you companions of the one lit window in the knuckled-down row of sleeping houses,

all you who think nothing of the midnight hour but by three or four have done your work and are on the way home, stopping

at traffic lights, even though there is no one but you in either direction. How different the dark is when day is coming; you know all this.

All you who have kept awake through the dark of the night and now go homeward; you, charged with the hospital's vending-machine coffee; you working all night at Tesco,

you cleaners and night-club toilet attendants, all you wearily waiting for buses driven by more of you, men who paint lines

in the quiet of night, women with babies roused out of their sleep so often they've given up and stand by their windows

watching the fog of pure neon weaken at the rainy dawn's coming.

#night workers #helen dunmore #homeward #poem #poetry

[love is more thicker than forget] // e.e. cummings

love is more thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win less never than alive less bigger than the least begin less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky

#love is more thicker than forget #e.e. cummings #love #poetry #cummings

The New Moon Economy // James Harms

We’ve all been in towns that wouldn’t have us, whose woods beyond the cemetery hide houses made of leaves, their windows lit low by peat fires, the slow stink of heat rising through trees then sinking into grass, the mounds that seem to shrug and settle. And the exiles we are, in overcoats and heavy shoes, we present our sticky faces to the tellers and soda jerks, the lovely girls cracking gum at the luncheonettes, and we’re told to leave, simple as that, told to walk our sorry selves back to sea, back to sod, back to wherever we come from which, funny enough, is a place a lot like this one, happy once and lovely and now turned like the moon to black.

#new moon economy #james harms #the new moon economy #poetry #lit

Morning Song // Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand around blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night long your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.

#morning song #sylvia plath #plath #poetry #happy birthday sylvia plath

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